When the Wind Blows

When the Wind Blows is a novel by the American writer James Patterson, published in 1998 and followed by a sequel, The Lake House.

Frannie O'Neill works as a veterinarian in Bear Bluff, Colorado, where her husband, a local doctor, was killed three years before and where she has thrown her attention into the animals instead. A new neighbour moves into the cabin behind her house, an FBI agent called Kit Harrison, and he is investigating a case that seems to touch on her husband's death. Late one night Frannie sees a small girl running through the woods behind her hospital, a child with wings, and catching her turns out to be the easy part: the girl, Max, and her brother were raised as experiments in a laboratory known as the School and were separated when they escaped. Kit and Frannie's search for the others takes them inside an institution that would rather they never came looking.

Patterson later turned the situation into the Maximum Ride series for younger readers, and this novel is where the flock of winged children first appears.